…gods are born of ichor and nectar, their excellences already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar: destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters.
For my final book review of the year, I decided to go with the winner of the Goodreads choice for Best Fantasy Book of 2018. I may have to make a habit of this, because the Goodreads voters really knocked it out of the park.
Author Madeline Miller’s latest book Circe is told from the point of view of the goddess of sorcery, best known for turning hapless sailors into pigs in The Odyssey. Miller specializes in retelling stories from Greek mythology, a story format that’s irresistible to me. There’s just something so appealing about reading a familiar story from a completely different viewpoint. I do love a good retold fairytale, and Greek myths are fairytales on steroids.
I would not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.
I don’t think an omnipotent, dazzlingly beautiful goddess would make a very interesting protagonist (where’s the conflict when everyone adores you and you can take pretty much everything you want by force?), which is why Circe makes for such a compelling main character. The oldest and mostly-disregarded daughter of the god Helios and his wife Perse, she’s beautiful and powerful only in comparison to mortals. Her family of gods and goddesses, naiads nymphs and dryads, Titans and Olympiads, is full of all the soap-opera drama that we’ve come to expect from the Greek gods.
An early experience with Prometheus teaches her something about suffering and compassion, and an early attempt at love teaches her that she has more powers than any deity imagined. Getting banished to an island – and not coincidentally separated from her mean-spirited relatives – ends up being one of the best things that could have happened to her.
However.
She’s a minor goddess in a pantheon of major gods. She’s capable of empathy, she trusts and loves easily, and she’s surrounded by people who aren’t and don’t, who actually enjoy making people suffer because they’re bored. She sees all the bright shining potential of humans who will soon be dust while she lives on forever. And probably worst of all, she’s a woman in a world where females are considered property, status symbols, or maybe just targets.
Circe suffers. A lot. Repeatedly. Sometimes the violence is emotional, sometimes it’s physical. The fact that she can use her power in ways that you know she’ll end up regretting is overshadowed by those times when she doles out some pretty vicious sorcery to people who desperately deserve it.
Their backs bent, forcing them onto hands and knees, faces bloating like drowned corpses. They thrashed and the benches turned over, wine splattered the floor. Their screams broke into squeals. I am certain it hurt.
It’s not all bad though. Miller paints a beautiful picture of Circe’s island of Aiaia, the home where she was finally free to learn everything her sorcery was capable of, the years spent harvesting herbs, brewing potions, taming lions and wolves. There are romances and brief flings that are as satisfying as they are surprising (though not quite as surprising as how cruel some of her family members can be when they really put their minds to being horrible), and the author overlays the story of them with the wistfulness of someone who knows that neither the love affair nor the lover are going to last very long.
…I pressed his face into my mind, as seals are pressed in wax, so I could carry it with me.
Most of all, what makes Circe such a perfect narrator for this book of gods, monsters, and heroes is that she’s connected in some way to all of them. Her generation is, what, only four times removed from Gaia, the mother of everyone? Name any story from Greek myths, and it will involve one of Circe’s siblings, or cousins, or a mortal in-law who’s very sorry they ever got involved with this lunatic family. Each time a new character took the stage I found myself thinking, “Ooo, how is this going to go?”
If Circe doesn’t have a ringside seat to the tale then she’s intimately familiar with the terrible upbringing and family politics that turned them into the person they became (especially her female relatives; the women in this pantheon each find a unique way to deal with the fact that if you want to be loved then you have to make yourself vulnerable, but if you want to be safe then you need to be horrifying.) And in between things like the birth of the Minotaur (and a very frightening element that I’d never thought about), or Circe practically screaming a prophecy of doom at a love-struck witch who is not hearing it, there are some bright moments. Imagine getting to walk through the workshop of Daedelus and bringing home a handmade present, or spending a year listening to Odysseus tell stories every night the way only he can tell them.
This novel is the story of Circe, learning the powers of transformation and being forced transform herself in the process. But it’s also a framework for the myths, both how they happened and everything before, after, and around them. What did Scylla do to make Circe that angry with her, and how long would it take before Circe regretted what she’d done? Why would Jason do such an abrupt about-face with Medea, the woman who betrayed her father and repeatedly saved Jason’s life? Imagine an adventurer coming home after twenty years of war, gods, and monsters; now what? Miller gives the reader something with each retold myth that’s exactly like Circe’s own tale: a story I hadn’t even known I really, really wanted to hear.